Why was Donald Trump rambling about Marco Rubio, his daughter, Ivanka, and tariffs in response to a question on what he would do to solve the childcare crisis?
Easy: he’s senile.
But seriously, there was more than senility at play here in the back-and-forth on childcare at a forum hosted on Thursday by the Economic Club of New York.
The part of the meandering answer referencing Sen. Rubio, R-Fla., and Ivanka Trump, harkens back to a family-leave proposal advanced during the first Trump administration that critics suggested was part of the Trump- and GOP-led effort to phase out Social Security.
This is according to Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik, who deciphered Trump’s meandering mention of Rubio and Ivanka Trump in his answer to the question from Reshma Saujani, a Democratic children’s advocate, as a callback to their 2018 proposal for paid family leave.
The Rubio-Ivanka Trump proposal, as it was laid out back in 2018, would have allowed families to raid their future Social Security benefits to be able to qualify for 12 weeks of family leave.
As Hiltzik pointed out, “the Urban Institute calculated that for every 12-week leave, new parents would have to delay their Social Security benefits by more than twice that period, or as much as six months,” and the institute projected that parents who took four 12-week leaves “would lose 10 percent of their retirement benefits, for life.”
In 2024 dollars, this would represent a $200-per-month hit on their future Social Security benefits, according to the Urban Institute analysis.
All of this, to fund a parental-leave program that the think tank calculated would cost, on the high end, $15 billion per year in 2025 dollars – a trickle relative to the $150 billion a year that Trump and the GOP gave in tax cuts to millionaires in billionaires in 2017.
“The worst aspect of the plan,” per Hiltzik, “was that it fostered the impression of Social Security as a piggy bank, to be drawn down for any conceivable financial hardship – to buy a house, repay student loans, and so on.
“Once the first one of these plans is enacted, you can be sure that others will follow, until there’s almost nothing left of Social Security’s guarantee of a living income in retirement,” Hiltzik wrote.
I’d argue that the even-worser-than-worst part of what Trump unwittingly revealed here is that, as Hiltzik referenced, the Rubio-Ivanka Trump plan was “for paid parental leave, to tide families over only for the first two or three months of parenthood,” meaning, “it had nothing to do with what Saujani asked, which was how to help families with the cost of childcare that can extend into a child’s adolescence.”
Neither did anything else from Trump’s verbal diarrhea in his response, in which this was the actual exchange:
Reshma Saujani: “If you win in November, can you commit to prioritizing legislation to make child care affordable? And if so, what specific piece of legislation will you advance?”
Donald Trump: “Well, I would do that, and we’re sitting down, you know, I was, somebody, we had, Sen. Marco Rubio, and my daughter Ivanka, was so impactful on that issue. It’s a very important issue. But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, that because childcare is childcare, couldn’t, you know, there’s something, you have to have it in this country, you have to have it.
“When you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to, but they’ll get used to it very quickly, and it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us, but they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country. Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including childcare, that it’s going to take care, we’re going to have, I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time, coupled with the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country, because I have to stay with childcare, I want to stay with childcare, but those numbers are small relative to the kind of economic numbers that I’m talking about, including growth, but growth also headed up by what the plan is, that I just, that I just told you about.
“We’re going to be taking in trillions of dollars, and as much as childcare is talked about as being expensive, it’s, relatively speaking, not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we’ll be taking in. We’re going to make this into, make this into an incredible country that can afford to take care of its people, and then we’ll worry about the rest of the world. Let’s help other people, but we’re going to take care of our country first. This is about America first. It’s about make America great again. We have to do it, because right now we’re a failing nation, so we’ll take care of it.”
Seriously, let’s just go ahead and give Michael Hiltzik a Pulitzer for being able to make anything out of that.
Video: What was Donald Trump meandering about this time?
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Chris Graham
